I just don’t value Christmas much any more … I do give out gifts but at this point, I just hand out money to the people I want to gift to because I never know what people want, especially kids and teens … and when you give them money, they know exactly what they want to do with it.

Halloween however, I do spend a lot more on. And I don’t spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on big ugly props and blow up things or store bought crap … I spend quite a bit of money building up a supply of candies, chocolates and chips. I take the month leading up to the holiday and steadily buy a little bit at a time. Then by Halloween, I’ll hand out handfuls of stuff to every kid that comes to the door. This year I had 100 kids and they each got a bunch of stuff. Then I have a tradition at the end of the night of waiting as long as possible and then giving away whatever I have left to the last kid. This year, it was a couple of teen boys who looked to be about 15/16, I filled one guys bag by dumping my box of chocolates into his sack … the other kid was just messing around and didn’t even have a bag, so I gave him a supply of old pillow cases I had ready, handed him one and told him to open it up as I dumped the rest of my chocolates and chips … those were two of the happiest guys I got that night … the bonus was that I didn’t end up with all that candy that would have made me sick anyway.

Bingo! … that is why Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol as a series of ghosts that visit Scrooge … it was a tradition of story telling of retelling scary ghost stories during the longest day of the year … the moment in the year known in pagan religion as the moment in the year when the dark forces are at their strongest and highest … the winter solstice, the longest night of the year when the darkness is at its strongest … but also a moment of hope, as the light has started to return and the days grow longer.

I do spend a lot of money on Halloween … more than Christmas … but it also means I don’t go crazy either. Almost all the money I spend just goes to candies, chocolates and chips … the Halloween serving size … I’m not going to start going further than that. I also don’t spend much on decorations, I put up enough to make people and kids know I’m celebrating Halloween … and I decorate five or six real pumpkins. That’s it … I put on a sound system with scary music and Halloween songs and serve candy all night long.

Gives a whole new gravity to this time of year

Because they report the news and inform the public … their content just tends to have a four or five year lag compared to reality.

My conservative inner demon trying to colonize my wild open self

The only dumb thing I see now is how dumb America has generally become to normalize all this stupidity.

He’s an idiot president leading a nation of idiots.

I think you’re confusing the nostalgia of other people.

Most people are very fond and attached to their own personal nostalgia.

But most often are not familiar or even don’t understand other people’s nostalgia.

Reddit users: WE DID IT!

Did they pause to type into their phones to ask ChatGPT how to response to these accusations?

If we keep feeding all these LLMs with all our bullshit … it will never be intelligent

If they keep talking with all their hot air and raise the temp to about 175C … they could bake themselves into a cake

Third for Summit

My cousin from Alpha Centauri had a good laugh at this … ‘affordable healthcare and housing’ … lol

Two screams one sugar

Possibilities? … in the US?

The only possibility I ever see in the US is in knowing that they are going to make everything so much worse for everyone else .

China closes the airspace over Taiwan

Has a different meaning to everyone when you change the country names

In North America … being called ‘cheap’ is almost an insult as if to suggest someone is always tight with their money or doesn’t want to pay for things or constantly never wants to pay full price for things

Being ‘frugal’ is more open meaning that just means someone wants to save money and be mindful of their spending.